"Pacific Rim Uprising"

by Kristina Livingston - Executive Manager

Tue, Apr 3rd 2018 10:00 pm

As someone who loved the unique combination of archetypes, big blue beasts from another dimension, and robotic punches of Guillermo del Toro’s 2013 “Pacific Rim,” I’m ashamed to have paid money to view the sequel, despite having waited five years to see it made. Del Toro and his writers created a perfectly adaptable universe that could be built upon for the creation of a franchise, and somewhere along the way, the new team that took the sequel on combined a mess of ideas that resulted in one hour and 50 minutes of “straight to DVD” atrocious writing, taking the original film and slam-dunking the plot and every single element of characterization into the garbage.

The film star John Boyega of “Star Wars” was equipped with cheesy lines and casted alongside kid actors who deliver equally subpar performances. Boyega stars as the son of the previous film’s hero, Idris Elba’s Stacker Pentecost. Boyega spends his screen time running around as a flat character, failing his late father and trying to keep teenagers in line with the same amount of immaturity.

“Pacific Rim Uprising” does nothing to honor the monster genre, but rather, makes a show of the studio’s capabilities in animating giant fighting robots, which, don’t get me wrong, are awesome, but I didn’t pay $8.50 to see a chaotic, knock-off “Transformers.” The last quarter of the film consisted of a series of nonsensical fights which were entirely indiscernible.

I’ve never gone to see a movie and contemplated walking out, and I’ve never been so disappointed in something that had the potential to be great. The team involved with “Pacific Rim Uprising” did not honor a single shred of del Toro’s universe, ensuring that the few returning characters got little screen time and awful, out-of-character plot arcs. I genuinely laughed once during this sequel – all other times the laughter came at the atrocious dialogue I was meant to take seriously.

In this day and age, shiny movie technology just can’t replace a good story. Many thought “Pacific Rim” to be quite cheesy, but it had passion and originality at its core.